


Temporal Nonsense

by Kamary



Series: The Jersey Devil [14]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Epilogue-prologue, Multi, Other, core!Frisk, polymory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-04 02:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5317772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kamary/pseuds/Kamary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even though you didn’t know what happened (you will always know, deep inside), you were happy, because you were all together. Who really cares about temporal nonsense anyway? {finale}</p>
            </blockquote>





	Temporal Nonsense

**Author's Note:**

> What type of story do you like? Do you like the ones that explain, or the ones that leave it all a mystery?

The idea was collaboration between the three of you. You, Sans, and Alphys. Alphys had a knowledge of souls that nobody else did. She knew how to maintain them, and if anyone could create a theory on how to make a false soul, it would be her. However, creating a false soul would be impossible without Sans’ knowledge of the Core. Nobody know how he knew so much, but he did. Sans just knew how it worked and how to pull the energy that you needed.

Nobody knew exactly how much energy was stored in the Core, but it should easily be enough for you to make what you wanted. You were the third and final part of the plan. To make a soul, you needed one with enough strength to give up part of itself for it. You were more than willing to donate a chunk of your soul for him.

You’d gone through so many resets trying to save him. Somewhere along the way, you became something like a scientist. Everytime you redid it, you learned more and more about he worked. You knew how much time you had left to save him. That’s why you had to do it now. Your third time resetting, you stayed with Asriel, living in the ruins, until he turned back into a flower. It was after that reset that you knew you could never leave him.

He left a strange feeling in your heart, something you didn’t understand yet. You felt like you’d know him forever, and at this rate, you had known him for a good few years. He didn’t know that though. He probably saw himself as a blip on your consciousness. You would probably never see him again. He was wrong. You would see him. You would save him.

When you saw him again in the Underground, he was shocked. He was even more shocked when you took his hand and dragged him towards the Core. Excitement brimmed in you, doubled by your upstairs roommate. Chara might never have been part of the plan, but they were going to help as well. You knew they couldn’t do much, but they would encourage you from the side lines.

If there was enough energy in the Core, you wondered, could you make them a soul too? Chara couldn’t go on sharing your soul forever. You would be happy to share it, but you knew they couldn’t. They were fading from your mind. Every day, their voice got a little weaker. It got harder for them to control your body for them. Soon, they would be gone. But, each time you reset, they got back their strength.

Acting now was more for Chara than Asriel. Chara would go first. You wanted them to see that Asriel was okay before they left you. Even though saving Chara might be impossible (they were too big for a monster soul and had no physical body to ride in. As least Asriel still has something), you wanted them to go out happy.

The encouraging hum of them telling you to save their brother kept you confidently pulling the goat forward. He didn’t seem to want to go, and you knew it would do no good to tell him you could save him. He didn’t want to be saved. Asriel felt he needed to be punished. But you wouldn’t allow that.

It was a long walk to reach the core, a mostly silent one. You had silence Asriel the whole way there. He has so many questions, but you wouldn’t answer. You couldn’t have him running. As cruel as it was, you had to save him now. Chara was barely talking anymore, they didn’t have the strength. That scared you.

The core though… It was a terrifying place. Last time you just passed through, but now you were going to its internals. Asriel knows more about this place than you do. It takes him a moment to realize what you’re doing, but as soon as he does, he tries to pull away from you.

“Frisk, we can’t go there!” he exclaims. There’s a certain fear in his eyes. “Even with your determination, it’ll scatter you through time and space. You won’t be able to come back.”

Ah, so he knows about that too. You only know the vaguest of information about the Core incident, but that was enough to realize there was more to the Core than you had originally thought. Asriel seems to know more than you though. He pulls, but you do not realize him. You’re human, you are much stronger than him and he doesn’t really have any physical matter to fight you with.

“Asriel, just… Trust me, okay? I know what I’m doing.” Your look silence him. You can’t see it, but you know it’s tired and old, much older than your body. It was the type of look that somebody who only has only hope left can give.

“Frisk… I… No, I won’t doubt you.” The familiar echo rouses Chara enough to almost have them make a sound. This level of weakness from them makes you want you cry. You release Asriel’s hand and enter the inner workings of the core.

You remove the instructions from Sans and Alphys from your pocket. It gave you all the codes you needed to release all the energy built up in the Core. Alphys thought it was just enough to run all the electricity in the underground, but Sans knew it was much greater than that. That was what scared you. Nobody knew how much. The only unit of measurement they could give you was ‘a lot’.

“Frisk, will you at least tell me what you’re doing?” Asriel’s voice sounded behind you. You just gave him a smile, both warm and tired.

“I’m going to fulfill an old friend’s lash wish.”

And then you released the core’s energy.

You always thought of magic like fire. That’s how Toriel’s appeared and you thought of her magic as the most iconic of all magic. However, this pure magic was less fire like and more water like. It reminded you of the lava outside, except drained of all colour. It was like a mix of mercury and water, clear and silvery and beauty. It waited as an open pool, expecting you.

“You’re not going to…”

It was a risk, a huge one, but one you were willing to take. If you disappeared here, that was fine. The world was already saved. There was no more need to reset unless you were saving Asriel, and this was his only chance.

“Don’t worry, Asriel. It will all be alright.”

And with that, you reached into the Core.

You thought you could handle a single touch, just enough to take the energy you needed. It seemed that the estimate of ‘a lot’ was far too low. This was at least nine ‘a lot’s. It was easy to reach across dimensions now. Using that power, you reached even farther, to every Core, in every reality and took its power.

But as did every Frisk. Suddenly you weren’t one Frisk. You were all Frisk. Every one at once. In that moment, every heart beat with one single desire.

The happiest future.

It was an inexhaustible energy source, what you had obtained. A thousand Frisks in a thousand timelines could make a thousand souls for Asriels and they would never come close to even denting the energy in the core.

But so much energy could never be properly contained. The moment you touched it, your soul was jarred from your body. Given all you had lived through, this should have been a normal thing you for, but this time it was different. Your body and soul were now completely separate. This should have killed you, but it didn’t. At this point, bodies didn’t matter anymore.

You watched (how do you watch without eyes?) as your body was blown away like ash in the wind. You listened (how do you hear without ears?) for a horrified Asriel, but there was nobody. In this moment, you existed outside of time, in a way that even Asriel didn’t. You were alone, but you felt strong. You felt good, right, powerful, in a way that you never had before.

It was so easy, you realized now, to make a soul here. You barely had to use a speck of the (your) energy. You cupped your imaginary hands and shaped a heart in white energy. You tapped your own soul and chipped off a speck, placed it inside the new soul and floating it off. You put it into your invisible storage.

Hmm…

If making a soul for Asriel was so easy, would the same now be true for Chara? They were separated from you in this void, not powerful enough anymore to have a presence. You pulled at the part of your soul they once inhabited. They weren’t physical, but when you were like this, they were as good as. You took what was no them and placed it away from your soul.

You cupped more of the energy. You paused in the process. You’d thought it before, but it was true. A monster soul would never be enough to house Chara. They were too… Big. Too passionate, too fierce. A monster soul would metal for the force of their remembered determination. They’d need a human soul. But that was easy. This energy, it was greater even than the six souls. You’d tapped into all the parallel dimensions, accessed infinite energy. It was more than enough for you to give some up for Chara.

They just needed a body. You could make them one out of magic, but… Asriel needed a new on too. You didn’t have much physical matter laying around…

No, you did. You remembered the ashes that were once your body. Yes, that would do. A part of you resisted. You needed that. You needed to go back once you saved Asriel, but you ignored it. You could give up a little. You’d just replace it with magic and nobody would be any the wiser. So you striped away a bit of your body and placed it into two lumps of magic.

Shaping Asriel was easy. You remembered how he looked. You let the information flooding in through the magic teach you the rest of it. It told you things that you could have never know, information from across all of time and space. You created a body like the one that Asriel would have had if he never died, one where he’d grow as big as his dad.

You did the same for Chara. It was the body of a stunted child, someone who had been locked out the light for so long that they would never grow big. If Chara had lived a happy life, they could have been big, strong, and healthy. Lanky and androgynous, but bigger than you would have grown. But they did not live a happy life.

You could change that, you know. You thought about it, but didn’t. Chara would have never met Asriel. Asriel would have never died. People wouldn’t have suffered, but time and space would unravel, trying to fix the mistakes that you made. No, you couldn’t change the past, but the future was yours to create.

You finish shaping your friends and look to the future. What would their futures be like if you stayed like this? You could, if you wanted to. You could stay a god forever and shape their futures. You actively calls forth that possible future.

With no Frisk, Asriel took over your role. The ambassador prince. He didn’t enjoy it, but was skilled enough to effectively keep peace between monsters and humans. He was cute and harmless, and people loved him. You guided the pieces around him. He’d be such a success. Yet, no matter how you moved the pieces, he never seemed as happy as he could be.

Chara didn’t like this world. They didn’t like being near people, but they feared for Asriel (you could feel it, their unease. They had a piece of you, so it was like you were living through them). They shook whenever humans spoke to them alone, but regardless, they took a step forward. They became Asriel’s partner. It wore them down. No matter how you moved the pieces, a happy future was impossible for Chara.

And you.

You couldn’t be happy unless they were happy. You wanted so badly to find that perfect future, and yet, you could not. The world was missing a very important piece. It reacted by sealing an unhappy future unless the piece was put back.

And you…

You didn’t want to leave either. If this non-body could cry, it would. As it was now, this was could as it could do, futures shifting to become more unfortunate. It was too much. This future without you was sad. A knot of… Something settled in your chest. Seeing Asriel and Chara together like that…

The emotion was most similar to jealous, but not quite that. To be more exact, it was the feeling of not wanting something to exist without you. Not to squirm in between and steal it for yourself, but you be a part of it. You didn’t quite understand where these feelings were coming from but…

You looked for new futures, futures where Frisk was with Asriel and Chara. You found it quite easily. These were happy futures. It was soft, domestic. Yet, you craved it.

You saw yourself on a nice date with your two friends, laughing when the waiter called Chara a child. You saw yourself breaking down and being comforted by Asriel and Chara. You saw the three of you attending your mother’s wedding, soon followed by your own. You saw yourself holding a small goat monsters in your arms. You saw yourself at forty-five, stepping down from the role of ambassador to give it to a monster with sharp eyes and a pure heart. And you saw yourself at three hundred, cuddling with your datefriends and never quite letting them question why exactly you had lived this long.

…Yet there was still unhappiness. Not in them but you. That unhappiness threatened to ruin things. It brought up questions nobody could understand, nobody except for you. A sigh escaped you. This was the fate of your world, it seemed. You could not continue to have a life and exist in this form.

…

You already decided what you wanted, didn’t you? It wasn’t just for you. You couldn’t allow a world to exist where one of your dearest people was unhappy. So you’d let it fizzle out. It wouldn’t truly go away, but for now, you could forget.

The power slipped out of you as you reformed your old body so you could return to it. You placed Asriel in their new body and Chara in theirs. More power left you. You began to mourn for it. It was amazing, to have existed in this way. Even if you always would, the power would always come when you called, you mourning losing the omnipresent view of the world. It would hurt to know you could have stopped people being in pain ahead of time. You know you are that type of person.

So you forget. You forget you are/were/will always be this impossible being, the merciful God of Hyper Determination. Was that how Asriel felt when he released the souls? It was so difficult. He was so strong. Your non-existent eyes closed and you fell into reality.

…

“…is…”

“…p…”

“Fris…”

“..mbass! Get…”

“FRISK!”

“WAKE THE FUCK UP!”

You jolt awake. Your eyes open for once and you look around. Last you remembered, you came to the Core to save Asriel, and now… Then you see him. Then you see them! Your heart beats joyfully. They’re alive. Oh, how happy you are. You’re instantly embraced by Asriel while Chara continues to stare at their hands.

“I’m here?!” It’s strange to hear the voice outloud. Chara doesn’t sound happy, just confused. “How am I actually… Frisk, what did you do?”

You blinked. You did this. No, you just came to get a soul for Asriel. …They were starting to fell awfully solid. You think something strange must have happened. Something you did? You don’t know how, but know this to be correct.

“I... Don’t remember, but, that’s fine. Because you’re here! You’re both here! I…! I can’t believe it!” You reached out over Asriel, pulling Chara into the hug too.

Even though you didn’t know what happened (you will always know, deep inside), you were happy, because you were all together. Who really cares about temporal nonsense anyway?

**Author's Note:**

> And that's it, the end of the Jersey Devil. I'm glad to have written this, but it's over now. I hope you all enjoyed it. It have it's ups and downs (cough, Political Rivals, cough).  
> Special mention goes to reset-time-2, who let me use the title God of Hyper Determination. Thanks to everyone that read this.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [better days are near](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5342537) by [HappyCamper27](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HappyCamper27/pseuds/HappyCamper27)




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